You Are What You Eat

Image: Photograph: Alok Brahmbhatt; courtesy: 022 at Trident

In India, we like to think of our food as healthy, especially compared to all those Western barbarians with their highly processed, empty-calories fast food. So how come we’re the world’s diabetes capital, with at least 50.8 million sufferers? And the way things are going, we could soon add heart disease to our “credentials.” 

Photograph: Alok Brahmbhatt; courtesy: 022 at Trident

The truth is, our diet — and yes, we generalise hugely here — with its high consumption of rice in the South and wheat in the North, is not a bad one for hard-working farmers. But move down a few generations and transplant that diet to an urban lifestyle, and you have all the ingredients of a health crisis. To give you a clearer picture, we picked some favourite Indian dishes and, with nutritionists Ishi Khosla, Jyothi Prasad and Priyanka Rohatgi, we calculated how much sugar, salt and oil (all of which we tend to consume too much of) goes into our food. Recommended total daily intake: Oil 5-6 tsp; sugar 7-8 tsp; salt 1 tsp.

Photograph: Alok Brahmbhatt; courtesy: 022 at Trident

These are approximate measures

(Research: Nilofer D’Souza & Divya Subramaniam)